


The Many Faces of Anna Winchester

by ughineedcoffee



Series: The Runt of the Litter [21]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Child Abuse, Depression, Djinni & Genies, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreams vs. Reality, Drug use/abuse, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family, Foster Care, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Home, Hurt/Comfort, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), REALLY REALLY REALLY SAD, Suicide, little sister - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:40:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29186451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ughineedcoffee/pseuds/ughineedcoffee
Summary: Anna grew up Winchester style, with a car for a home and a nightmare to match every good memory. She's got a good home, a good family. But what if she hadn't grown up just so? Change one little detail, and her life would have been a whole lot more painful. So, here they are: three lives Anna never lived, and what would become of her if she had lived them.Trigger warning: child abuse, depression, suicide, drug use/abuseAll around, this story is upsetting and sad. Please take care of yourself and don't read it if it's going to trigger you.
Series: The Runt of the Litter [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2112966
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	The Many Faces of Anna Winchester

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, guys! This story is very near and dear to me. I had the idea in my head for literally years before even attempting to write it, because I wanted it to be as good as possible. That being said, it's SAD and INTENSE. Please read the trigger warnings before you read it. And if someone wants a summary/wants to see the parts of the story they could read, reach out to me with a comment on this fic or another one I've published, and I'll get it to you somehow.
> 
> Okay, on with the story. This takes place just after the Winchesters have found the Men of Letters Bunker in season eight. Anna is fourteen in the present of the story, and her age changes in other parts, but you will always know how old she is in a given scene.

For the first day, it was like nothing else. The number of nooks and crannies to explore, the number of books donning the shelves, the number of artifacts and weapons lying around looking medieval and a little awesome, a bedroom all to herself with a desk and a bed and a closet, the bathrooms and showers and just the sheer amount of space... Anna had the time of her life exploring the Men of Letters Bunker those first twenty four hours-- all of this within the boundaries of "Don't touch the swords, Ladybug," and "Don't go too far by yourself, Rugrat," and "Don't touch any of this stuff until we know what it is, Anna." It was hard to have all that much fun when she was so limited, and Anna quickly ran out of things to do.

Now it was day two, and Anna was bored out of her mind. Sam was poring over a handful of books at one of the tables in their new library, Dean was setting up his new room, and Anna was just laying on the floor of her bedroom trying to remember the pathway to the library from here. She didn't think it would be worth the possibility of getting lost to try going out there, so she just lay on the cold floor and stared at the ceiling.

It was really strange having her own room, strange enough that she'd barely slept a wink last night because she kept feeling pangs of anxiety at being all alone. She felt stupid for it. She was fourteen now, after all, but she'd never slept in her own room before. Hell, there were still times when they couldn't get a room with a third bed or even a sofa and she had to share a freaking bed with one of her brothers. She hadn't seen this coming from a mile away. As great as it was, it was also really weird.

The door swung open and Dean leaned in, one hand on the doorframe and the other on the doorknob. "I made lunch," he said proudly. "You should see the kitchen, Rugrat, it's like something straight outta Food Network." Then, as if it had just occurred to him, he asked, "Why are you laying on the floor?"

"I couldn't remember how to get to the kitchen," Anna admitted and hopped to her feet. She ducked under Dean's arm into the hallway, trying to ignore the shit-eating grin he was wearing now knowing that she couldn't navigate the bunker hallways yet. "How did you make lunch? We have no food."

"I picked up a few things in town."

Anna gave him an affronted look. "You shoulda told me so I could go too."

Dean snorted, then seemed to realize she was serious but the amusement in his eyes didn't fade. "We've been here for less than two days. You're already climbin' the walls?"

Anna shrugged. "There's nobody selling drugs outside my bedroom window. There's no case. The walls aren't even an ugly color. Well... not a bright ugly color. Just kinda drab. The world looks super boring from in here."

"The drug thing only happened once, okay? So, don't say it like it happens at every motel we've ever stayed at."

"Point is, it would be interesting. Instead, we're all... safe and stuff." She made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat. "Oh my god, I thought this was the wrong corner," she exclaimed as they made a turn. "See? I would've gotten lost."

Dean rolled his eyes fondly and reached out to ruffle her hair, but Anna predicted it and ducked.

As soon as they'd all finished eating lunch, Sam went back to the library and buried his face in another round of books. Dean followed him and broke into the liquor cabinet he'd been excited to discover yesterday. When Anna recognized their plans, she carefully navigated her way back to her bedroom.

From there, she grabbed her phone just in case she got lost, and figured that if the boys could explore the bunker how they wanted, then she should be able to explore it the way _she_ wanted. She wandered down the corridor and found another hallway with several doors labeled _archives_ and _storage_ and _DO NOT OPEN._

She carefully turned the knob to the one that said storage. It was dark inside, and she had to use the flashlight on her phone just to find the switch. When the light came on, it was from a small, simple fixture which hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. It lit the tiny room rather well, though. Anna stepped cautiously inside, looking around for hints of anything dangerous. She'd been warned against touching things and going too deep into the bunker for a reason, after all, and she knew that. But she was capable of staying out of trouble and of finding her way back if she just focused.

Maybe she would find something really cool to show off.

The room was filled with potentially cursed objects. There were bottles and jars all over the place, some of which looked old and artsy, others of which were just filled with mysteriously colored liquids. On one shelf, she saw something that she figured would be safe to pick up and examine. It looked like a curse box, and those were okay so long as you didn't open them and take out whatever was inside.

She lifted the box off the shelf and was surprised by how light it was. Usually they were made of pretty heavy material on top of being blessed and having latin wording inscribed on them. This one was relatively simple, though. Its lid was inscribed with a few symbols Anna couldn't decipher. She ran her fingers over them, wondering what might be inside. The door that had said archives on it probably had these items all catalogued. She figured she could run across the hall and check.

Maybe it would be something helpful, like an old weapon that worked on demons or angels or a healing charm or something. More often than not, cursed objects were more dangerous than helpful, but if the Men of Letters were keeping all of these instead of destroying them, then _some_ of them might be helpful.

She set the box down and turned away too quickly to notice the way the symbols glowed baby blue as she stepped away.

She was halfway to the doorway when she saw a shadow pass in the hallway just before Sam stepped into the room.

"There you are," he snapped. "What did we talk about yesterday, Anna? You're not supposed to be messing with this stuff."

"I'm not _messing with it_ ," Anna argued, feeling defensive and looking it too as she crossed her arms over chest. "I'm just looking at it. I got bored just sitting in my room. Not all of us are nerdy enough to enjoy reading lore books, you know."

Sam gave her an unimpressed look, but he didn't reprimand her further. He just gestured for her to step out into the hallway and then closed the door behind the both of them. "There's more than lore in the library, you know. I thought you'd have a field day with all the classic novels in there and it turns out you didn't even notice them."

"They have novels?" Anna gaped. "Oh my god. Why didn't you tell me they had _novels_? I'm gonna read all day and night," she determined.

()()()

"Aren't you restless?"

The question had come out of the blue. It seemed that way even to Anna as she asked it. But even after reading two full length novels, therefore keeping too busy to notice the afternoon and evening fly by, she felt like she was losing her mind in the motionlessness of the past two days.

Sam looked up from the book he'd been halfway through turning a page in. "What?"

"You're not restless? At all?"

"Not... really," he answered slowly. "It's been, what, two days?"

"Yeah, about," Anna replied. She sighed and let her chin hit her hand, elbow resting on the table. "But we haven't done _anything_. I mean... _anything_. We haven't gone out for food. Well, except Dean."

Sam chuckled, releasing the page he'd been turning. "Anna, it's been two days. Give me a week, I'll be restless." He started to go back to his book, but she spoke again, catching his attention.

"But we haven't done _anything_."

"This is really weird for you," he realized aloud. "I guess it makes sense. I mean, have you _ever_ gone a whole day without getting in the Impala even once?"

"I don't think so," Anna mumbled. She sighed. "We've never had our own kitchen before. Or bedrooms. Isn't it weird not having windows? Or not hearing all those stupid cars on the roads outside?"

"It _was_ pretty weird trying to sleep with all that peace and quiet last night," Sam admitted, smiling faintly. "But it was really nice having a decent mattress and a soft pillow and a warm blanket."

He had a point, but Anna still couldn't get past the weirdness of it all. "I guess so."

"You'll get used to it," Sam promised. "Speaking of, I think we should probably both be going to bed. It's almost eleven."

"Yeah and we've got such a big day of doing literally nothing again tomorrow."

When she crashed on her bed fifteen minutes later, Anna stared at the ceiling and listened to the silence for nearly an hour before falling asleep.

()()()

_The sun rose in a mark of pink and purple from the thin command of the horizon line to the edges of the clouds. Anna stretched her arms up above her head, wide and in the shape of the letter v, and she laid back down slowly on the couch cushions beneath her._

_The couch was ratty and had been for as long as she could remember. It got dirtier and more torn apart with every passing year, but there had never been money in the budget to get a new one and there likely never would be._

_As she swung her cold feet over the edge of the further cushion and let the sole of her foot brush against the floor, an empty glass bottle clinked against another, and both rolled tiredly across a couple inches of wood before stopping with a second dull clinking sound. Staring at the labels of each bottle, Anna let her face fall against her hands, elbows propped on her knees, and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. After a moment, she forced her heavy head back up, and her tangled curls hung against the tops of her shoulders as she scanned the room. The window was patched by an old, thin bed sheet-- which was why the room was always so damn cold-- and the room itself was small enough to suffocate whoever sat inside. With a short sigh and a tap of bare toes on a smudged glass bottle, Anna muttered, "Good morning, shit hole," and forced herself to stand._

_Her right arm curled instantly around her stomach, fingers protectively pressed against the left side of her ribcage. "Fucker," she spat, but she kept the word under her breath just in case the man in question was awake to hear her. She walked hunched around her middle through the room, empty bottles paving the floor as if to remind her just what kind of life she was living._

_They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, but she wondered sometimes if it wasn't really paved with empty beer bottles and dirty needles. She thought it funny that even Hell might be sugar-coating something. The whole world clawed itself into pieces sometimes just to watch the blood spray and yet in the end it always_ always _gestured ambiguously at the gore left on display and called each drop of blood a granule of sugar-- salt on its more honest days._

_Beneath her bare foot, a shard of glass she hadn't seen stood at attention. As she stepped toward the doorway between this nightmare room and the next, the sharp edge bit her heel, and she pulled her foot back up, stepping back, barely biting off her cry of pain in time. If she'd failed and been too loud..._

_She held her breath for a moment and the room bled with her fear. It seemed as if she could take a breath, but the stillness shattered with the dull thump of feet against the floor down the little cramped hallway outside the door. Anna flinched bodily with the soft disturbance. "Come and get me, asshole," she dared in a whisper, slowly lowering her bloody foot to the floor. She stepped backward, away from the broken bottle and carefully around several others that littered the floor, all intact._

_The door swung open, and bloodshot, half-drunk eyes had her foggy green ones shying to the floor and its carpet of bottles. She was surprised by the puddle of blood forming under her foot._

_"Makin' a racket already and the day's barely started," Kenneth grumbled low as he shoved his way by her. Anna stumbled one step to the side, her bloody foot slipping and tapping another empty bottle which rolled lazily along the floor. "Good idea," he taunted. "Get the clumsy outta your system before Chloe leaves."_

_Anna turned away from him without a word and stepped-- more like limped-- toward the couch she'd slept on the previous night. Back before Kenneth had invaded their lives, she'd had a bed to sleep in. But they could only afford the one even with both Anna and Chloe working, and Ken slept in the bed with her mother now._

_"I'll beat it outta you while she's gone."_

_Anna turned her head just enough so she could see the stubble on Ken's chin. If she looked him right in the face, she would lose all her nerve. Pain was a constant now that her mother's boyfriend actually lived with them. But even though it was always there, it was still frightening enough to keep both her and her mother in line for the most part._

_Anna was inching closer and closer to a place where she just didn't care anymore, where the bruises and the blood and the insults meant as little to her as the tears in their old, raggedy couch, where all of the pain was background and no longer did anything to change her behavior. She wasn't there quite yet. As often as she liked to tell herself that nothing mattered, she still couldn't look him in the eyes when she talked back to him. She still couldn't think about the hit she knew was coming before giving him a dirty look, or she would lose all drive to challenge him._

_The pain was a constant, and most of it was background, but it still ruled her when she let it._

_"Two days in a row when Mom's out," she snarked, looking back at the floor as her voice shook despite her resolve not to let it. "You're_ asking _for our concerned neighbors to call the cops."_

_"And they still won't," Ken glowered, stepping up so that he towered over her, knocking empty bottles every which way as he moved. He never liked for her to insinuate that there was anything she could hold over his head, Anna knew. After all, what did he hit her for but power, an outlet for his rage that would never fight back? Well... never_ hit _back. Anna had a way of letting her anger come out in little bursts, those dirty looks and snarky comments that never earned her anything but a new bruise or broken bone. "Because everybody on this side of town knows what a piece of work you are. That bitch Martha could watch you hit the ground and she'd just nod right along."_

_Anna swallowed hard and rubbed her eyes with her fingers again. She didn't want to be looking at him when that dangerous thing in his eyes inevitably snapped and he grabbed her by the arm to shove her against the wall or onto the floor. Miraculously, he didn't touch her just yet, instead leaving her to think about his words. She knew better than to buy everything he said._

_Maybe if he'd been with them for longer, he'd have clawed deeper inside her head, deep enough to convince her that the whole world was on his side and that she was the problem. But Anna was fifteen and smart. She knew better because she knew herself. Ken had power over her because she had no way out. But once she'd saved up enough money, she had plans to get out. She would catch a bus, head to Lawrence, Kansas and try to find her father. If she couldn't stay with him, at least she could cuss him out, maybe make him feel guilty enough to set her up somehow. At the very worst, she would be forced to make her own way. At best, she might find a real home. She didn't know what that looked like, but she did know it would be a beautiful thing. Just thinking of it was sometimes enough to make her cry, enough to make her want to hitchhike to Kansas instead of saving up her money to buy a bus ticket, to chase her dream of a real family_ now _instead of waiting a few more months._

_But every time, it came down to the one thing that she could never work up the courage to leave behind. Her mother._

_As much as she knew that she didn't owe her mother anything, Anna couldn't make herself believe it. And she couldn't make herself abandon Chloe the way she felt Chloe had abandoned her. It felt wrong in every possible way. But Anna knew her mother only too well. She knew that there was no way of convincing her to leave Kenneth, for herself or even for her daughter. Chloe wasn't cold-hearted, but she wasn't hopeful either. She tended to be of the belief that there was no way out of bad situations, and she subjected herself to them time and time again for that very reason._

_Every once in a while, she would look her daughter in the eyes and get sorrowful, tearfully whisper something like, "We'll be safe one day, baby, you'll see. We'll be safe." But Anna had stopped believing that a long time ago. She couldn't remember the last time she'd put any real faith in her mother._

_The door down the hallway creaked open and then shut. Kenneth backed away from the sofa and went out of the room. "Come make some goddamn coffee!" he shouted from the doorway. Anna didn't know if he was speaking to her or her mother, but she got up to play servant anyway._

_They'd only known Ken for a couple of years, and he'd pulled Chloe right under his thumb too quickly for either Anna or her mother to kick or scream. It was the latest part of a pattern, though, so when Anna woke up one morning to realize that they were officially trapped under Ken's shoe, she barely flinched, barely registered her own dismay._

_Chloe was raised by an abusive mother, something she'd explained to her daughter one night in vivid, terrifying detail while high on something her boyfriend at the time had slipped her. A conversation that had ended with Chloe saying 'you're lucky you got me' had actually left Anna wondering how the hell she'd turned out to be the parent and whether there was really anything she could do to help her mother, or if they were both too fucked up to ever be real people at all._

_When Chloe had grown older, nearly every romantic relationship she'd been in had been unhealthy in one way or another. As far as Anna could tell, the only person her mother had ever been with that hadn't hurt her was a man named John who, Anna had pieced together from Chloe's incomplete anecdotes over the years, was Anna's father. He hadn't hit Chloe, hadn't verbally abused her... but he_ had _gone away despite being the first person to treat her right, so maybe he'd just done his own variety of hurting. Chloe always said he'd left them both at her request. He was a military man with two much older kids of his own, he was always on the road, he didn't know the first thing about raising a daughter, blah blah blah._

_Anna didn't care about who her father was or what life with him would have looked like. It wouldn't have been like this, and that was enough to make her long for it. That was enough to make her resent her father more than she resented even her mother._

_Kenneth watched her walk into the kitchen, her arm wrapped around her waist. She felt like she was holding her ribs together with that arm, and she was limping heavily with every step, now because of both her bloody foot and yesterday's bruises._

_"I'll make it," Chloe's small voice offered from the doorway. Anna turned to see her mother skittering into the room, her face drawn and pale, a new black and blue streak running along her left cheekbone. She wanted to be angry but after last night... she didn't feel inclined to spend any more time defending her mother's honor only for Chloe to stand tight-lipped and teary-eyed as Ken beat her daughter into the floor._

_"I got it, Mom," she said briskly under her breath and scooped coffee grounds into a new filter._

_"Let me-"_

_"Let the kid be useful for once, Chloe," Kenneth boomed, screeching a chair back from the table and sitting heavily down in it. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit one up right there in the kitchen, knowing good and well how much Chloe hated for him to do that. "Hurry it up with that," he ordered Anna. "I've got the worst goddamn headache."_

_Anna turned to look over her shoulder at him as she filled up the coffee pot with water. He had a smug look in his bloodshot eyes, like he felt that he'd won something. Power, she supposed. He had that look a lot. "Sorry," she said quietly, just like her mother._

_Funny because the last thing Anna wanted was to be anything like her mother. Funny because Chloe had expressed a similar wish once._

_In the dim lighting of the kitchen, Chloe rushed back and forth, quiet as a mouse, making breakfast and getting ready for work. As soon as the door closed behind her, the two people left in the room looked at each other, one with disdain and the other with fear. Anna limped out of the kitchen as soon as she had the opportunity, and she sat down on a discolored toilet lid to touch the cut on the bottom of her foot very gently with a wet rag. She sucked in a sharp breath through her teeth. The pain was so different-_

()()()

In her bedroom at the bunker, Anna tossed in her sleep, eyes fluttering open, bloodshot, then sliding closed again. Her breathing came in sharp pants before she suddenly settled again, body going limp under the covers. Her forehead was damp with sweat, hair sticking to her face. In her cheeks, a pattern like a Henna Tattoo glowed baby blue, and she slipped back into her dream.

()()()

_Her sixteenth birthday had come and gone. Anna had no more patience for her mother's timid ways or her guilt-tripping pleas that her daughter 'stop pushing him'. Telling Kenneth to stop blowing their rent money on cigarettes and poker games shouldn't be considered pushing, even if it did end with a fresh bruise for her and sometimes for her mother too. Threatening to pay the rent with her check herself instead of letting it ever brush his fingers had left her hospitalized, so clearly Chloe didn't have the same sense of relativism that Anna did. Being bruised was no longer anything in her mind, and they needed that shitty one bedroom apartment. It was all they had. So, she resolved to try again._

_In the dimly lit kitchen, where the floor was covered in a layer of grime and the table was being held together in places with duct tape from Ken's past rampages, Anna slung her jacket over the back of the nearest chair, the one stained with her own blood. She pulled her check out of the pocket but ignored the uncalloused, dirty hand waiting for her to fork it over. Instead, she took a step back from Kenneth and folded the check neatly to a quarter of its original size._

_"What the fuck are you doing? I'm taking it down to the bank right now. It don't matter if it looks pretty."_

_Anna bit the inside of her cheek as the memory of the last time she'd done this invaded her mind. She could barely remember it, really, aside from the moment she'd realized that she might actually be about to die and the moment she'd woken up, barely able to see, and found out that her mother had aided Ken in lying about an accident._

_"Give him the check, Anna," Chloe said now, sitting at the kitchen table with her chin in her hand and a cup of whiskey in front of her._

_"Why?" Anna asked, purposely looking at her mother instead of Ken. Her mother was the least frightening person on the planet. But Kenneth... "So he can buy a fifth of whiskey? Get drunk before he hits you tonight? That's fucked, Mom. I'm not givin' him any pretty little excuses for tomorrow morning."_

_Her collar was gripped tight, knuckles at her throat, and Anna's back hit the wall so hard the wind was knocked out of her. "Watch how you talk to her, girl."_

_Anna wanted to scoff, shout, or cry at his bullshit. Chloe wasn't his real concern. He just didn't like seeing Anna speak her mind, especially when she was speaking the truth. Funny to think that the one person in their sorry excuse for a family capable of doing what he wanted still chose to hide from himself. This apartment and everyone inside... they were so fucked, fucked beyond repair, and suddenly Anna didn't care anymore. Her heart was racing and her body shaking with fear and adrenaline, but she didn't care if it killed her, she had to speak. She couldn't take another second living under Ken's thumb, or watching her mother live under it. She couldn't keep getting out of bed every morning, too sore to breathe correctly and barely able to convince herself the world was worth living in at all._

_"I'm not giving you the money," she whispered determinedly, voice shaky._

_In the next second, Ken's hand had moved from her shirt collar to her throat, and her feet weren't on the ground anymore. Anna choked and heard her mother crying, but she saw black before Ken let her go. Her vision was still mostly blurry when he leaned down in her face, a vein popping in his forehead and his whole face bright red and a little purple with rage. "You think can do any fuckin' better out there? I'm done with your ungrateful ass. You can get the fuck out-"_

_"Kenny-"_

_"_ Shut _it, Chloe."_

_"Mom, tell him to get out," Anna demanded. "Tell him." For once, Ken was keeping his mouth shut. But he looked pissed, and Chloe was looking at him. Anna knew what was going to happen, and her heart broke with it. It broke so hard she suddenly felt nauseous. Her eyes welled. "Mom," her voice cracked. "Tell him. This isn't his house."_

_"It is now, Sweetie-"_

_Anna looked at the check in her hands and then at her mother whose eyes were pleading for her to hand it to their abuser._

_"You know how this home works."_

_Anna stared at her mother's green eyes, pale in color but paler in life. "I don't," she said with as much strength as she could muster. "I don't."_

_Just three minutes later, she was sitting on the curb outside the apartment with nothing but her paycheck, her worn denim jacket, and a backpack full of old clothes to her name. She used the toe of her sneaker to drive a cigarette butt into dust on the gravel and then suddenly jerked with a sob. Slowly, she started to cry and before long was crying like she'd never done it before, like she had sixteen years of pain and misery to get out in just a few minutes because then she would have to stand up and do something or go somewhere... or die._

_She'd been beyond sad for years, maybe her whole life. But she'd always told herself there was something out there for her once she got out of the house. That something..._

_Anna stood up, still crying hard enough that she couldn't even stand up straight. Her whole body hurt, and her throat was swollen and raw from being choked and then from crying. She shivered in the wind and curled her arms tightly around herself, her jacket bunching under the pressure. She curled her fingers into tight fists at her sides, the bones of her fingers seeming to touch her ribs as the pressed into her sides. Her body shook violently and tears streamed down her face._

_That something..._

_That something she'd always wanted... A family. A home. She would never find it. Anywhere. Her mother had been there since day one, and in the end, she'd chosen evil over Anna. And maybe it was because Anna wasn't worth any kind of love or loyalty, but maybe it was because the world just wouldn't give it to her. Regardless, she knew better than to think that a man she'd never met and who had offered her a life when she was first born would welcome her now with open arms. She was sixteen and fucked in the head._

_There was no home. There was no family. There was no love. There was just pain. It changed form from year to year and sometimes from day to day. It went from mind to matter and then from matter back to mind so often it made Anna dizzy sometimes. It danced and sang and clawed and cried and eased and ached, but it was all the same thing. It was all pain. Every day, every hour, every minute. It was just pain._

_Anna had given up on feeling something more a long time ago, but she'd always thought it had to exist somewhere. Not in that apartment. Not even in their town or this state. But maybe in Kansas. Maybe in the other half of her family._

_But family was a broken word, and she was standing in a broken world, and she knew better. She knew so much better that she couldn't stop the shaking or the crying or the coughing so hard she tasted blood coming out of her torn up, swollen throat._

_"God help me," she choked at the sky. "Somebody fucking help me. I can't-" Tears dripped off her cheeks, past her ears, soaking her hair and hitting her shoulders. "I can't-" She cried harder, doubled over with her arms folded so tight against her stomach that she could barely breathe._

_The street was empty, the air was still, and the world was imploding._

_Anna heard an engine growl at her. She could barely see the oncoming truck through the tears that just kept coming. But she saw the headlights, wobbling out in front of it just in time to escape._

_And dying didn't hurt. Not like living._

()()()

In a flash of white, Anna could suddenly feel the tears soaking her pillow and face. She blinked several times, her eyelashes sticking with the heavy wetness of tears, sniffling and slowly lifting her head. Her throat still felt raw, but when she reached frantic hands to it and felt around, she discovered that it wasn't swollen or bruised, just a little dry and raw from crying in her sleep. She sat up straight in bed as the full force of her dream and all the emotion in it hit her like a bowling ball to the stomach.

Suddenly needing proof of her own life, she raced out her bedroom door and started banging on Dean's just across the hall with both fists. When he appeared, disheveled but wide awake and with a gun in his hand, she threw her arms around his waist and nearly sobbed in relief.

"What the hell?" he asked her, sounding both sleepy and annoyed even as he wrapped one arm around her, the other holding his gun down at his side.

Anna shook her head over and over. It had been the most vivid dream of her lifetime, but it had still been a dream. "You're real," she said and squeezed Dean even tighter.

"I'm sorry. I'm what?" Dean finally asked and pulled back to set his gun down on the desk in his room. "Anna, it's three in the morning. You gotta be bleedin' or dyin' to wake me up at three in the morning."

Unintimidated by her brother who was a real, decent father figure unlike the man from her nightmare, Anna grabbed Dean's arm and looked up at his tired green eyes. "I'm not but I thought I was," she said in a rush of breath and urgency. "I died," she said, then tilted her head downward so she was looking at two pairs of bare feet instead of at her brother's face. She felt a wave of sadness wash over her. "I killed myself." She could still feel the ache of of every bone and the damp, sticky tears on her face if she closed her eyes.

"What the hell are you talking about? You're right here, and you're being really weird."

A door opened not far down the hallway. "Wha's goin' on?" Sam mumbled, leaning out of his bedroom doorway. Anna couldn't help but think how strange it was for them all to be scattered. Had they not found the bunker a couple days ago, she'd probably have been shaken out of her nightmare long before it ended because somebody would've heard her crying.

"Nothing," Dean answered for both of them. "Just a... nightmare?" he guessed, looking at Anna again. She nodded a little frantically.

Sam started to ask, "You got i-"

"I got it," Dean promised. Sam's door clicked shut.

"I know it sounds lame, okay?" Anna said. "But this dream was crazy vivid. I mean I don't think I've had a dream that vivid in my life. I could _feel_ the bruises and the tears and I... I killed myself."

"Why do you keep saying that?"

Anna hadn't thought about it before, but those words were probably the last thing Dean ever wanted to hear come out of her mouth and she probably _should_ stop saying them. Hell, the whole thing was meta enough to make _her_ freak out when she said the words. "It's just... I don't know how to explain it but it was so... intense," she finally said for lack of a better word.

Dean squinted at her, clearly trying to understand. She knew he wasn't getting anything past the fact that she'd had a bad dream, though. "Alright, you know what? I know what to do."

"You do?" she asked, skeptical.

"Yep. I got a cure for nightmares, remember?"

In spite of herself, Anna felt her face break out into a smile. "Dean, I really don't think cocoa and marshmallows is gonna solve anything."

"How dare you doubt me," Dean quipped. He tied the strings of his robe to keep it closed and wrapped an arm snugly around Anna's shoulders. "It hasn't failed yet."

"But I've never had a dream like this before," she insisted as they turned a corner. "It was like... a whole life. My whole life but... like... an impossible version of it. And I was older."

"You really want to talk about this, huh?"

"I don't know. I mean I kinda don't but... it was weird."

"I believe you, Anna. You had a weird, vivid, intense dream. Whole lifetime. You were older," he laughed a little on that last line, clearly finding something about it endearing. His expression softened as he looked at Anna's face, frustrated and a little pale. "You look like crap, kiddo."

Anna sighed miserably. She just couldn't seem to articulate herself, but the last thing she wanted to do was summarize everything that had happened. She was freaked enough about having experienced all that pain in her own dream. The last thing she wanted to do was pass it on in vivid detail to Dean. "It just sucked," she said. "I felt like I was this whole other person." And she had been. "I didn't even know who you and Sam were. I was alone."

"Well, look," Dean said with confidence in the calm air of their new kitchen. It wasn't such a bad space, nothing like the one in her dream both because of the company and because of the layout and lighting. "I'm not one for, uh, analyzing the crap out of everything but... maybe your subconscious cooked this up because you're not used to bein' alone."

Anna frowned down at the tabletop, thinking about that. It would explain why other her had been so lonely but... there was too much detail for that to be it. She'd never known her mother, so why would Chloe have been a star character in her dream? And why, if her subconscious insisted on having Chloe there, was their life so unpleasant, ridden with abuse and fear and so many distressing memories even before this Kenneth guy? She couldn't get over the intensity of it, the painstaking detail, or the realness of the physical and psychological pain she'd suffered in the grips of it. It felt too strong to be her lonely little subconscious. But it couldn't be anything else, and moving into this place _was_ one of the biggest changes she could remember experiencing in her lifetime.

So Anna watched Dean make them both hot chocolate, and she rested her chin in her hand.

She'd smelled the musty air of that apartment, heard those empty bottles roll against each other, seen the glint of rage in Kenneth's eyes, tasted the salt and tang of blood and tears, felt the swelling of her throat and the aching of her ribs. But more than that, she'd felt those years inside of her hour of dreaming. She'd felt their weight, she'd felt desperation and hopelessness. She had _been_ Anna Taylor. She'd lived her life and died her death, and it had exhausted her.

()()()

She fell into bed at only nine o'clock the following night. She'd had an awful headache all day, and she'd been so tired, achy, and caught up in the aftermath of her dream from last night that she'd spent the day acting like an irritable child. As she pulled her blankets up around her and stared at the wall, Anna thought of her dream from the previous night. It felt more distant now after such a long, exhausting day. But she still felt some anxiety as she drifted toward sleep. Just as her eyes finally slid closed, tendrils of baby blue crawled over her cheeks and glowed for just a second before their light dissipated.

()()()

_Nobody called her father when Anna was born. And her mother wasn't interested in raising a child._

_She was fortunate enough to be placed into a foster family rather than an orphanage. But fortune doesn't last, and at two years old, Anna toddled into the arms of her second set of foster parents. She stayed with them for two years. They taught her how to read._

_Her third family was a lot less warm and a lot more overwhelmed. There were five other kids living under their roof, and they were all older than Anna. Two of them hated her and showed her what it was like to live in hell for the next year._

_She stayed in her next home from ages five to eight. Her foster mother there seemed to mean well sometimes, but sometimes she didn't give any of the kids lunch. Her foster father there liked to yell about all matters, big and small. Anna was moved from their home because, at eight years old, she had been scratched up by the family dog and her foster father was convinced that she had provoked the dog and was instilling bad habits in it._

_Anna turned nine years old in the home of a kind single woman named Amanda who had one other foster child under her roof. Amanda bought Anna the first birthday cake she'd ever had and even got her a present, a soft brown teddy bear with a tag that said its name was Wonder. One week later, Amanda was removed from the foster care system because of financial problems that would prevent her from adequately caring for children placed in her guardianship._

_Anna ran away from the next home after just one week of living there. She was caught quickly, but for the only time she could remember, somebody listened to what she had to say. Maybe it was the bruises and the blood, or maybe it was the terror in her nine year old eyes. They put her in another home and closed down the one she'd been in._

_She bounced between two more homes before turning ten. On her tenth birthday, she had no cake. On her tenth birthday, a boy about her age pushed her down a set of stairs. On her tenth birthday, Anna woke up in a hospital room, alone. On her tenth birthday, a twenty-something nurse with pretty brown eyes sat on the edge of her bed and cried with her._

_By the time she turned eleven, Anna was barely making it through each day, and she went through two more foster homes that year._

_At twelve years old, she started a habit of running away from every home before she'd been there a week. She didn't want people or their rules and laws and anger and pity. She wanted her own world. This one was no good._

_When she was thirteen, Anna found the first decent set of foster parents she could remember having in a long time. But they weren't perfect. They made her go to therapy. She was diagnosed with depression two days before the decision was made that she should go to a girls' home instead of staying in foster care. Someone somewhere had finally decided that the system wasn't working for her. Anna cried for the first time in years that night. She was huddled in a warm bed, but her bones were cold._

_"You have to go," she whispered to herself the following day as she stood in the driveway of the girls' home with a social worker standing several feet behind her. "It can only last so long anyway."_

_She settled in with surprising ease. Everything was about schedules at the Home. They woke up, ate breakfast, took turns showering, and did chores. They got a few hours of free time every evening, but there was very little trust even then. Anna learned why very quickly. She smoked her first joint during those few hours one Thursday night. The high was a beautiful thing. The world slowed down and got easier to live in when she had a joint between her fingers. She started smoking cigarettes shortly thereafter and discovered she preferred the calming effect of the nicotine to the speed-up effective of the Mary Jane. It made things feel more manageable by slowing her body down, but it didn't leave her mind feeling foggy, and the anxiety she felt between smokes wasn't nearly so bad. But sometimes she craved the high._

_The drugs got her through the next two years. But when she was fifteen and tried an acid tab for the first time, the whole group of girls she was with got busted. They were kept under close watch, and Anna itched for cigarettes constantly, but she couldn't get one. She got headaches and she threw up. By the time she had her privileges back, she was desperate for a smoke, and she nearly got caught buying a pack of cigarettes off another girl._

_She spent the next few months sticking just to the cigarettes and marijuana. She knew how to use those without getting caught. The acid had made them all crazy. The things she'd_ seen _. It wasn't easy to stay quiet and act cool when the world was swirling in front of your eyes. Anyway, she didn't like the idea of acid so much as some of the other kids. She'd heard stories about bad trips. One girl had told her they stemmed from bad memories. Anna had a lot of those._

_Hallucinogens weren't her style, but Anna had fun experimenting with other things the older she got. At sixteen, she tried edibles but they rarely made her feel anything. She started drinking. Tequila was her favorite. But she was the only kid in the home who could drink vodka straight so she pretended_ that _was her favorite._

_When she was seventeen, Anna found herself with a handful of snow. It was a high like nothing she'd known. The cigarettes made the world a little easier, the Mary Jane made her a little stronger, and the alcohol numbed her, but the cocaine... the cocaine made the pain go away, and it left something mind-blowing in its wake. Of course, that made it devastating to crash back down into her ongoing depression. After that first high, she became violently ill. She swore off cocaine until she turned eighteen and got out of the Home. She was still ruled by the Home's schedules, so she couldn't afford to be high all the time. But once she was out, it would be a whole different story._

_They didn't give her anything but a trash bag of her own belongings when she turned eighteen. So Anna hitchhiked until she was somewhere in New England and then just stopped walking when it became clear she wasn't going anywhere. She tried to find a job, but she had no references or skills and she was thin and sickly looking. Nobody wanted to hire her, and she understood why but that didn't make her hate the world any less._

_She spent a week on the streets, got just enough charity from passersby to eat one meal each day._

_Then she found a dealer. It felt like a godsend._

_He didn't sell crack or marijuana or any of the things she'd tried in the past, he told her, but he had something even better. And if she agreed to work for him, he would let her try it._

_Anna knew how screwed up it all was. She knew there was no excuse for the kind of work she would be doing if she agreed to his bargain. But she thought she had the right to fuck things up for herself after the world had spent so long shitting on her every hope and dream. She hadn't seen a damn thing worth living or dying for since she was twelve years old. The highs were the best thing she knew to exist, temporary and costly as they may be._

_She said yes._

_Heroin was better than cocaine. It was better than anything she'd ever had. And when she came down, it was worse than anything she'd ever known. The world somehow looked worse in withdrawal than it had looked before she'd ever gotten high on anything._

_When she was nineteen, she was arrested. She didn't expect anybody to show up to pay her bail, but some guy in a trench coat with black hair and blue eyes showed up before she could be carted off anyplace. He paid her bail and didn't seem to notice the way she was scratching her arms nearly to shreds. She itched so bad for a hit of something--_ anything _\-- that she barely heard him say that he knew who her parents were and could connect her to her family._

_When she finally did register what he'd said, she didn't care. What good would family do her now that she was all grown up and fucked up beyond repair?_

_They thought they could do a lot. There weren't any parents to come to her rescue, but two tall guys claiming to be her brothers came at her with surprising care considering they'd never met her or known she existed before. Anna tried her best to get them to leave her alone, but the word family meant something wholly different and a lot less ugly to them than it did her. They seemed to think it was a panacea, like it could somehow erase everything bad that had ever happened to her and make today look like a day worth living._

_They were staying at a motel in town for the night. So Anna stepped out around midnight while they both were sleeping in the next room. She found a dealer two blocks away. She stuck the needle in her arm with force. This feeling-- the good and the bad of it-- was her only real home, her only real family. It was the only constant and it was the only thing that had the potential to feel good at least_ sometimes _. She counted on that as she felt the high take over, knowing she would wake up in a few hours feeling itchy and restless to see the world still looking like the same shithole it had always been._

_But the heroin was bad, and Anna didn't wake up._

()()()

Anna woke with her heart racing in her chest and her breath coming hard and fast as she stared up at the ceiling, patterns of baby blue glowing briefly, unbeknownst to her, in her cheeks. She turned quickly onto her side so she could see the desk in her room and the wall of the bunker, anything but the starless night sky that had been her final sight in that dream.

The alarm clock on her nightstand said it was only ten o'clock. One hour, and she'd dreamed another lifetime-- _lived_ another lifetime.

Anna threw off the blankets and ran to the library where both boys were sitting at the table and looked up in surprise when she came in. "Are- Are you okay?" Sam asked, studying her strangely as she sat down across from him without saying a word but was visibly freaked out.

"No," Anna breathed. "Not really. I think I just OD'd."

"What?!" Sam shouted and backed his chair away from the table so suddenly that it screeched along the floor.

"Wha-? Not in _reality_ , Sam. In my dream." She shook her head, curls grazing along her shoulders.

"You had another one?" Dean asked as Sam pulled himself together and sat back down.

"What do you mean another one?"

Anna looked at Sam and sighed. He'd been half-asleep when he stepped into the hallway last night, so it wasn't too surprising that he didn't remember but she didn't like explaining this. "Yeah, another one," she said and rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands. "It's freaking me out," she admitted. "They're so real, Dean."

"Well, they're _not_ real," Dean offered soothingly. He set his beer down on the table and got up to stand behind her chair, one hand on her head. Anna didn't know why it helped, but it did. Just being grounded in this real world made her feel a little better. But the release from her state of relative panic also made her realize just how much her head hurt, worse than it had earlier that day even.

"I'm confused," Sam said, watching Anna rub at her forehead to try and chase her headache away. "You're having dreams about dying?"

Anna shook her head. "I don't just die. I live first. Like, a whole life. A short life, but a whole life. The first time I killed myself and this time I OD'd on heroin."

" _What_?" Sam asked indignantly. "How does that make sense?"

"Well, it... I wasn't this me."

"Alright, look," Dean said and crouched down in front of her chair. "If these dreams are as vivid as you say they are, there's a chance this is more than just some weird coincidence or your subconscious messing with you."

"I know," Anna mumbled. "I think it's something different. I don't feel right," she admitted quietly.

"What are you talkin' about?" Dean asked, his expression changing.

Anna buried her face in her hands. "I don't know. I just hurt. Especially my head. And I'm so tired."

"That's because you haven't been sleeping well," Sam reasoned, but he had his laptop out already. He had already started to type something into a search bar when he suddenly paused, frowning. "Did you... pick anything up in the store room the other day?" he asked her seriously.

Anna reared back a little in surprise. It had been the last thing on her mind, but... "I mean, I found this old curse box. But that doesn't make sense. I didn't open it."

"Well, maybe it wasn't a curse box," Sam proposed. "Show us."

()()()

"Okay, so, I've been reading up on this thing for a few hours now," Sam finally said into the stillness of the library. "And I think I've finally got all the info we need."

"What is it?" Anna asked sleepily, curled over a lore book beside Dean at the next table down.

"Well, it isn't a curse box." Sam turned his laptop so his siblings could see the screen. "It's a Marid," he explained. "They're a subtype of djinn, and they're noncorporeal which is why they can be trapped in boxes like the one Anna found."

"Okay, but it's still a type of djinn," Dean said.

"Supposedly the most powerful. Some accounts say they're nearly as powerful as the angels but their drive is totally different." He clicked on a hyperlink on the screen he'd been showing them and an image of a person with blue tendrils crawling up their cheeks popped up. "When they feed, they do it pretty slowly, and they let their victims wake up between feedings. It usually takes between ten and fifteen times for a person to actually die. But, supposedly, you start feeling it before that."

"Hence the headache," Anna muttered and let her forehead hit the table. In some ways, it was scary as hell finding out that there was a djinn feeding on her. But in some ways, it was relieving. The two best hunters on the planet _were_ sitting in the room with her planning how to kill the thing, after all.

"So... okay," Dean stood up. "If the thing isn't corporeal, the usual djinn tactics won't work."

"Exactly," Sam said. "Which is why the Men of Letters trapped this one."

Anna winced. "Please say we know how to trap it again."

"We can't," Sam said. "That box you found, I can't find anything on it in the lore. I think it must be something the Men of Letters designed and executed themselves. I don't know how to replicate it."

"So then please say we know how to kill it," Anna tried, wincing a little at the knowledge that she might be totally screwed.

"We do, but, uh... it's not gonna be easy."

"Lay it on me," Dean told him.

Sam turned the laptop back toward himself. "Well, like I said, it's not corporeal, but more than that, it doesn't work like other djinn when it feeds. According to the lore, it actually enters the mind of its victim. It stays out of sight and feeds directly on the emotions as the person lives out the hallucinations it creates."

"So other djinn eat you while you live out a happy dream life and this one eats... the happy dream life?"

"If it's eating emotion, it's not eating happiness," Anna corrected and shoved a handful of hair out of her face. God, she was tired. And achy.

"It doesn't feed on the feelings themselves," Sam explained. "It feeds on the actual energy. According to this," he said, scrolling as he spoke, "Marid don't trap people in real-time hallucinations. They give them whole lifetimes every time they feed and that way they get more sustenance from each feeding. Which is _exactly_ what happened to Anna."

"Okay, so how are you killing it if it's only there in my creepy dreams?"

Sam bobbed his eyebrows. "We have to go there too."

Anna's eyes widened. "You really don't want to do that," she said, shaking her head. Both boys gave her strange looks, and Anna realized what they were thinking. "I mean because of the dreams, you idiots." She shook her head again and then rested it on the table. "They're not pretty. I mean, I already told you, the first one ended in my suicide."

"Anna, we've got very few options here," Sam told her as gently as possible. "We can either find some dream root and walk into your head, or we can watch you die slowly and painfully. I know which one I'm voting for."

"And if you have to watch me die slowly and painfully in the djinn world?"

"Then at least we wake up after," Sam determined. "I'll take it."

()()()

"You're sure this is gonna work?" Anna asked that night as she sat on the edge of her bed and watched Sam drop strands of her hair into two mason jars full of liquid. She wrinkled her nose just at the sight of them. It didn't look appetizing in the slightest. But more than that, the place it was going to lead them... that turned her stomach more than the brown-looking liquid did. Anna was never going to touch anything in the archives of this bunker _ever again_.

"Of course we're sure," Dean said and patted her on the shoulder. "We're sure, right, Sammy?"

Sam gave him a look and brushed his hands off before picking up the two jars and handing one to Dean. "You just have to wait for one more hallucination to play out, Anna," he promised. "And then we'll stab the sucker when it shows up to end the dream."

Anna sighed nervously, but it was a relatively straightforward plan. All she had to do was trust her family. She would have an unpleasant dream again and then wake up and be fine. "You gonna knock me out now?" she asked, bracing herself for a hit to the face. She was surprised when they both laughed at her. "What?"

"I can't hit you," Sam told her like she was crazy for suggesting it. Maybe she was. All Anna could think was how different-- how much _better_ \-- her real life was compared with her dreams. She'd woken to a beating nearly every day as Anna Taylor. But here... she could quite literally and very practically ask to get punched in the face one time, and it still wouldn't happen.

"Neither one of us is gonna hit you," Dean corrected. "And no one needs to. You're exhausted. Just lay down and go to sleep."

Anna reluctantly laid back and put her head on her pillow. She was anxious about this whole thing, but she _was_ exhausted. And for the first time since they'd moved into the bunker, she finally had her brothers in the room with her as she was trying to go to sleep again. She was out in just a few minutes.

This time, both boys were watching as the Henna-like patterns overtook her face and glowed baby blue.

()()()

_Just a week shy of her eighth birthday, Anna stepped up onto the railing of Dean's hospital bed and leaned over it. She had a cast on her left arm and gauze taped to her forehead. But the real hurt was in her eyes. "They keep on fighting," she told her motionless older brother. "But it's because they're scared, I think. I'm scared too," she admitted, picking at the hospital sheets with small fingers. "You can't go away, Dean. You're the only that never went away before."_

_The heart monitor suddenly started beeping loud and fast, and a flurry of doctors and nurses ran into the room. Anna was tugged back away from the bed, and she stood in the doorway, clutching her stuffed frog to her chest and sniffling. Sam appeared there not long after and put a hand to her head as they both stood watching Dean fight for his life. It was close, but the doctors kept him from flatlining._

_"Can you fix him yet?" Anna asked as the last nurse left, looking up at Sam with bare hope and vulnerability._

_Sam held her eyes for a second before looking over at Dean on the bed. "Why don't you go sit with Dad?" he suggested and gave her a gentle nudge out of the room._

_Anna knew what that meant. It meant Sam had no idea how to help Dean, and maybe Dad didn't either. It meant Dean was going to die. She walked begrudgingly into their father's room, feeling like the whole world was falling apart. John was sitting in bed looking conflicted, staring down at a piece of paper in his hands. When Anna walked in, he set it aside and gave her an encouraging smile. "Come sit with me, Peanut." She did. They stayed there for a couple hours before John told her he wanted to go see Dean._

_Anna sat on a bench in the hallway with her stuffed frog for nearly another hour, restless and heartbroken and angry and_ terrified _, before John walked back out of Dean's room. "You wanna see him?" he asked her._

_Anna raced inside and climbed up onto the railing of the bed again. But Dean hadn't moved. He still looked just as hollow, just as sick, just as close to dead. It didn't make any sense to her. Why would the demon try and kill_ Dean _of all people? He was, like, the best person on the planet. Everybody loved Dean. Demons didn't tend to care about that, though. Anna sat down on the floor beside Dean's bed and held Halloween in her lap. Dean would get better because he was Dean. He was the only one who she knew wouldn't leave her for anything._

_She couldn't lose faith in him now, so she didn't. She expected him to wake up right up until the moment his monitor beeped for the final time._

_They barely stayed in town long enough to watch Dean's pyre turn to ash. Bobby said the car was beyond repair, but Sam argued with him about it until the Impala was back up and running. They piled into the car-- Dean's car-- and took off. Dad wasn't himself anymore and neither was Sam._

_Anna felt the same way watching them go on living as she had watching Dean lay in a hospital bed dying. They looked just as hollow, just as sick._

_John was distracted, throwing himself headlong into the hunt for the demon. He rarely even stopped in to say hello to Sam and Anna anymore. When he did, all he spoke about was the demon, how close he was, what he needed Sam to do. He was always saying how dangerous things were._

_Sometimes Sam put up a fight to say he wanted in. Sometimes he put up a fight to say Dean wanted them together, not fracturing over the hunt for the demon. Sometimes he didn't fight at all. Sometimes he stayed in bed all day and, as scary as it was, Anna couldn't blame him. After all, some days Sam looked so sad when he smiled at her and some days he couldn't smile at all. But he did more than John. He stayed, and he tried his best. He still hugged her and he still paid attention to her and he still loved her. Anna wasn't so sure if John felt anything for anyone other than that demon anymore._

_Gordon Walker came out of left field. He tied her up while Sam was out getting dinner, promising not to hurt her but saying the opposite for Sam. Anna kicked and screamed and choked on her gag, trying to get free and do something, anything. But she was too small and she wasn't strong enough. Gordon shot Sam the second he opened the door._

_Anna didn't stop screaming until she couldn't physically make a sound anymore. But she did finally manage to break the chair she was trapped in and get free. Of course, it meant nothing now. Sam was already dead, his eyes open but empty. Anna grabbed his shirt with her red, rope-burned hands and shook him._

_"Sammy..." she whispered. "Sam." She leaned down over his face and met his empty eyes. "Sammy." Tears dripped off her chin. "Sammy, you can't. You can't, okay? Y- you can't. You can't." She shook her head, face soaked in tears and tightened her grip on his shirt. "You can't."_

_John was furious. Maybe he felt something else under the surface. Anna thought he might. She would try to make herself believe it as she got older. Nobody feels pure rage. John lost his two children and his wife to the demon. He was allowed to be angry on the outside and Anna knew that somewhere, he felt as much pain as she did. But when John finally killed the demon, he was still consumed by anger. He shoved a rifle into Anna's eight year old hands and pointed at a lineup of bottles on a fence._

_"Get 'em all," he said._

_Anna thought there was something noble about this. She was learning to be somebody worth a place in the world. She was learning to save somebody. It was about time, after a life of watching people die. She raised the rifle and missed. And missed. And missed._

_John told her, rather impatiently, what she was doing wrong and Anna corrected and missed and corrected and got close and corrected and finally_ finally _hit one. She was so filled with frustration by the time she got the one that her very next shot was another miss. John stormed off, said he needed a minute but told her to keep practicing._

_Anna pointed the gun at the ground for a minute and tried to convince herself that she was capable of being what her father wanted. She thought about Dean, prone on the hospital bed the day it finally became clear that nobody could save him. She thought about Sam lying dead on the floor for nearly half an hour before she could even get out of her chair and beg him not to go. She thought about what might have happened to Dean if she'd been stronger, if she'd been able to help them take the demon out before it could kill him. She thought about what might have happened to Sam had Anna been strong enough to get out of that chair and take Gordon down or warn her brother or_ something _. She thought about how helpless she'd been her whole life, and she looked down at the gun in her hands, and she saw something in it that she hadn't seen all morning._

_She raised it, looked through the sights, breathed slow and careful, and fired. The second bottle shattered beautifully, and the shards painted a portrait of a warrior._

_From that day forward, Anna knew nothing but training. She ran a mile twice a day and then she ran two miles twice a day and then she ran three miles twice a day and by the time she turned twelve, she was running six miles morning and night. She could use nearly every weapon in the arsenal even better than her father, and she'd memorized every exorcism. She was working on improving her latin so she could discover more spells and exorcisms._

_When she was fourteen, she managed to take her father down in a sparring match. John took her on a werewolf hunt to celebrate. It was the kind of hunt that spiraled far out of the hunters' control before they even knew it was more than a simple seek and kill. It was the kind of hunt where one wolf turned out to be a pack of seven, the kind of hunt where they barely made it out alive..._

_It was the kind of hunt where they were still dragging themselves out of the woods, covered in cuts and bruises, when an eighth wolf bit John in the neck._

_Anna fired two rounds into its chest before it could even pull its teeth out of her father's flesh, but it was too late. There was no cure for a werewolf bite._

_John's brown eyes looked strange as he ordered her to stay back. They looked animal in a different way than Anna could ever remember seeing them, and it wasn't because he'd had time to turn. It was because he was dying and leaving Anna alone. She'd never realized her father was capable of getting sentimental, but he teared up watching her struggle to make a stoic face. He told her to find Bobby Singer, a man she barely remembered meeting when she was seven years old, promised that he would give her a home and help her keep hunting._

_Anna handed him the gun and he shook his head. "It's happening too fast," he said, gripping his chest with both hands. "You gotta do it, Anna. Do it now!"_

_Anna didn't waste time with denial. She just stepped back and stared at her father as he made sounds that were anything but human, fighting the turn to give her time. She couldn't believe what was happening. It didn't feel like that day Dean died, waiting beside his bed for him to wake up only for him to stay asleep forever. It didn't feel like that day Sam hit the floor in their motel room, a halo of blood around his head. It felt less profound. It felt like something that was always going to happen._

_John was the last person she had. But for as long as Anna could remember, John hadn't been anybody. He'd been a manual on how to fire guns and save stamina and treat wounds in the field. She'd never had a father, just a trainer. And if she could do this, then it would mean that she was ready to go on without him._

_Her whole face scrunched with the pain of it, but Anna lifted her handgun and aimed for the heart._

_She retched in the bushes for the next half hour, heaving and crying and choking on tears, snot, and vomit. She dropped her gun in the dirt and ran the eight miles to the truck so she could walk back with an axe, lighter fluid, and matches. She spent the next several hours building a pyre, slept on the ground next to her father's corpse when she finally ran out of steam well after dark, and then got back to work at dawn the next morning._

_It was nearly as difficult getting her father onto the pyre as it had been building the thing, but for more than one reason. Yeah, it hurt like hell trying to lift him onto it with all her bruises and scrapes and her small stature. But it hurt a lot more trying not to look at his face or touch him any more than she had to while moving him._

_Anna buried the gun she'd used deep in the dirty next to the ashes of her father's pyre._

_"See you in Hell, Dad," she said, voice, eyes, everything raw._

_She didn't call Bobby and she didn't go to South Dakota. Anna hunted. She hunted everything she could find and then some. She got good at stealing food and tricking strangers into giving her money so she could keep the trunk stocked with ammo._

_Once she was old enough, she made her own fake IDs and started gambling. She lost more than she gained at first. But she had a damn good poker face, and before long, she'd gotten good at walking in with five dollars and walking out with five hundred. She learned to watch her back for more than just monsters but for angry or jealous people. She used her hand-to-hand training more often on men in bars than she did on monsters during hunts._

_On the outside, she was one of the toughest, best trained hunters in the business, the kind of person that would never go down without a fight. But inside, Anna was empty and she had been for a long time. She hunted smart most of the time, but when there was nobody at immediate risk-- no victims inside the abandoned cabin or cave, no missing persons to be on the lookout for-- she hunted recklessly, and she was just waiting for it to catch up with her._

_The day came shortly after she turned sixteen-- not that she or anybody else was counting anymore._

_The claw buried itself deep in her side, too deep to come back out without killing her. And come back out it did, in a spray of blood. Anna screamed, but there was nobody there to hear it. She hit the ground, scrabbled to find her gun. The black dog had officially won this fight, but it seemed more spooked than predatory as it backed away from her with its teeth still bared. There were no civilians around, but Anna still had enough of a sense of responsibility to make sure the black dog was dead before succumbing to the pain of her wound and hitting her back in the dirt and leaves._

_She heard the monster whimper as it fell, and she thought of her father, gripping his chest and telling her to kill him. Interesting that the beast in the woods could die more pitifully than her human father._

_Anna pressed a hand to her own side and gasped as her fingers brushed against something that she definitely shouldn't be able to touch. An intestine or a rib or... god, she didn't know. But her assessment was over. There was no way she could get out of this alive, so she had no obligation to try. And she didn't._

_She lay on the forest floor and stared at the treetops above her, wishing she could see the sky, tell the clouds goodbye. She felt unnoble, blood soaking her body and twigs burrowed in her hair. She'd saved countless people in the last few years._

_Hell, she'd been saving lives since she was eight years old and picked up that rifle. But for what? None of it had been enough to bring back John, bring back Sam, bring back Dean. It had just been enough for her to lose_ herself _in._

_For the first time in years, Anna started to cry. And she cried. And cried. And cried. And choked._

_She could feel the world fading, and she suddenly felt like she had to fight, but by now there was no point in it. All these years spent laying down and taking all the shit the world threw at her, and when it was finally too late, she'd finally displayed a little bit of life, that Winchester spirit she'd lost at age eight. It hurt because it meant that not only had she failed to fix her family's deaths, but she'd let them down in one more way. She'd given herself up, thrown away all that was left of them. And now that she was seeing it, it was too late for her to do anything about it._

_But more than that... Anna was scared. She was scare to die and terrified to die alone. More than that, she couldn't be headed anywhere good. Maybe she'd stay a spirit, live in the veil, get angry and then lose control. She hoped not. But she hadn't been able to control her anger in life, so how could she expect to do it in death?_

_Her face was saturated with tears, her stomach with blood. She watched the world darken, struggling to stay with it though she knew the battle would be fruitless. She was shocked when a hand suddenly settled gently over hers, warm and calloused. She looked up into hazel eyes shadowed by shaggy hair. The impossible. She couldn't speak or she'd have said his name: Sammy._

_"You're not alone," he punctuated. "I'm here. I've got you. And everything's gonna be okay. We got him, Anna. We got him."_

_She was barely able to twitch a frown of utter confusion at her brother's words before the world began to shift, the trees around them bending and twisting like a green screen backdrop._

_And then it all went away._

()()()

"I can't believe those were all, like, kinda real."

"They weren't _real_ real," Sam corrected Anna, setting his laptop down on a table in the library. He sat down in front of it and Anna sat on her feet in the chair across from him. "They were just... like... _alternate_ realities, I guess. And, you know, the djinn never said _why_ it worked that way."

Anna shrugged and traced the edge of the table with her fingernail. "Maybe it's easier if you can just switch one detail and let things work out however they would."

"I don't think anything with the kind of power djinn have needs an easy way out."

Anna sighed and tugged the sleeves of her sweater over her hands. "You know," she said thoughtfully, looking right at Sam. "Two of them made sense. I mean, in one of them, I grow up in foster care. I see how that could have happened. My mom never calls Dad and instead she just kinda shoves me at the nearest social worker. Makes sense. And then in the last one, the one you saw..."

"Dad never made his deal," Sam finished for her. "You know, you never said what the first one was."

"It was awful," Anna said softly but with a raw edge to her voice. She looked down at the table. The pain had been so vivid. And constant. And inescapable. "But the whole premise... Are you sure it didn't make any of the dreams up?"

Sam shook his head. "It said it didn't do more than change one thing."

"So, I guess it just..." Anna shook her head. "Nevermind," she said.

It wasn't adding up for her that her mother could ever have raised her. In the version of her life where John never received a phone call, Chloe had left her to foster care. So, what choice could change to leave her in her mother's arms for good? As far as Anna could see, that would have required both Chloe _and_ John to have changed their minds about something. John would have to decide not to raise her and Chloe would have to decide to raise her. But more importantly, Chloe would have had to have lived after John returned. And her father's journal clearly said that Anna's mother had died the day after Anna's birth. There was no opening and no reason for Chloe to ever have taken her and for them to have lived the life her first dream had depicted.

Sam was giving her a strange look when she pulled herself out of her jumbled thoughts.

"Sorry," she offered and wrinkled her nose. "I keep thinking about everything. It's hard not to. I mean, I swear, I felt the years go by." Sam gave her an empathetic look, and Anna suddenly hated the attention. "So, anyway, what did you want to talk to me about?" She'd been planning to take about a month-long nap, but he'd invited her to the library to talk about something, and she loved the idea of getting that conversation out of the way so she could go catch some z's.

"Right," Sam said as if preparing himself. "Look, I don't think I have to say this after everything that happened, but I'm gonna say it anyway. You can't touch any of the crap in this bunker unless we know it's safe."

Anna bit her tongue inside her mouth to keep from immediately snarking back that she wasn't an idiot or a baby. She hadn't been entirely prepared for this conversation to happen, but she had seen it coming somewhere in the back of her overwhelmed mind.

"I'm serious, Anna. This stuff with the djinn was bad, but it could've been a lot worse. So just... no more exploring until we know what everything is."

Something in his voice made the stubborn flare of annoyance in her die down. He cared genuinely about her safety and she knew that. It just sucked being told that she'd messed up, and it sucked harder being given rules like a little kid would have. She was somewhat curious, sure. She could even be impulsive. But she wasn't stupid, and she felt that she was pretty well self-governed and didn't need rules and consequences to help her make her way. So, it sucked being given either one.

But she had to concede. She'd made a mistake

"Yeah, okay," she agreed. "I think I like the Batcave better boring anyway."

_la fin_


End file.
